by Unknown
He hadn’t seen Mike or Boone or Jonah for years. Isabella, Boone’s little sister, had been part of that earlier life of his. Other than his parents and brother, this was his first contact with his past since that explosion in that faraway land. Five years—an eternity in which his life had changed totally.
Emotions that he thought were as dead as he was supposed to be and often felt, surfaced, catching him off guard and tightening in his chest.
“Isabella,” he said in amazement, grasping her shoulder. “Those guys are like family. In some ways closer than my family because of what we did together…” His voice faded as his fingers clutched her shoulder. “Isabella,” he repeated in amazement.
Impulsively she reached out, wrapped her arms around him and held him.
Colin embraced her, inhaling her perfume, feeling a tie to his past with his best friends. Emotions tore at him; hurt for losses, relief to be with someone he could trust. Isabella—little Izzie—part of the Devlin family. He realized how tightly he was holding her and released her, stepping back.
She smiled and gestured for him to sit in the chair. “You don’t look the same, either.”
“No, I guess I don’t,” he said, his back to her. “I’ve had a lot of reconstructive surgery to put me back together. Damnation, you’re Izz—Isabella. No wonder you were a handful. Boone taught you how to protect yourself, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did. And sometimes we still practice. I work out.”
“You’re baby-sitting Mike’s baby?”
“His regular nanny was ill, and Mike and Savannah had a trip planned, so I said I’d stay,” Isabella explained as she dabbed antiseptic on his scratches and put gauze and bandages over the deepest cuts. “Sorry, Colin,” she said when she knew his cuts stung from the medication.
“That’s okay.”
“There. I’m done,” she said briskly, putting gauze and antiseptic away. “We can go sit somewhere and you can tell me what’s going on. Would you like something to drink? Or to eat?”
“Oh, yeah. I can’t remember when I last ate,” he said, falling into step beside her. Her head only came to his shoulder. “For someone so small and dainty, you pack quite a wallop.”
“Thank you. I tried.”
He laughed wryly. “Evidently, I need practice.”
“You were very old-fashioned and gallant. You could have hit me at any time and ended the battle.”
He smiled at her and was caught again as an electrical current stirred every nerve in his body, a reaction he didn’t want in the first place and sure as hell didn’t want now that he knew who she was. “It’s hard to equate you with Boone’s kid sister,” he said in a husky voice.
“I grew up,” she said, her voice breathless, making his pulse skip. Their gazes were still locked and they had stopped walking and were simply standing, staring at each other.
“If you’d given me the rest of the year, I never would’ve guessed who you are.”
“I haven’t changed that much,” she answered, looking up at him with crystal-blue eyes that mesmerized and held him.
“Yes, you have.” He sighed. “I know I have, too. At least they fixed me up where I don’t scare little kids.”
“No, you’d never scare children.”
Silence ensued, a taut stretch in which his heart hammered and he felt himself come alive in ways he’d thought were impossible. “We were headed somewhere,” he reminded her.
Taking a deep breath, she turned, but not before he saw her cheeks flush. “The kitchen. It’s at the end of the hall here on the main floor.”
“Do you live with Boone instead of in Kansas?” he asked.
“The family home is gone. Mom died four years ago, and we’re all scattered now. I’ve lived in California, but Boone talked me into moving back here. I’m living in his guest house on his ranch while my house is built in Stallion Pass.”
“I heard the guys all inherited from that fella we rescued—Frates.”
“That’s right. You would have been in the inheritance, but they thought you were dead.”
“I was.”
When she looked at him sharply, he shrugged. “I might as well have been dead. For a long time I was near death. I had surgery after surgery, but they finally patched me up. It’s a long story.”
“Go ahead and tell me,” she said. “I’m interested and I know Boone will be.”
Colin couldn’t resist and caught her braid in his hand. “Isabella. I just can’t believe it’s you. Are you married?”
“No. There’s no man in my life. And you’re changing the subject.”
His gaze drifted over her features. “Must be your choice, then.”
“You were telling me about what happened to you. You said you had operations.”
“Yeah,” he said as they entered the kitchen. He paused, taking in the oak cabinets, earth-colored ceramic flooring, burnt-orange-tiled countertops and copper pans hanging from a pot rack above a tiled island.
“Sit down. I’ll get you something. What would you like to drink? Mike has everything—beer, milk, tea, coffee, soda.”
“I’ll get a beer and if you have sandwich fixings, that’ll do.”
“You can have a sandwich or what I had tonight—prime rib, baked potato—which will take no time in the microwave oven.”
“You twisted my arm,” he said, his mouth watering over the thought of prime rib. “I’ve been on the run and haven’t been visiting four-star restaurants. I haven’t eaten anything since about five this morning.” As he started toward the refrigerator, she walked toward the pantry and they brushed against each other.
Colin reached out to steady her and this time the tension that streaked between them sizzled. Inhaling, he turned away, clamping his jaw tightly closed as he yanked open the refrigerator door, took out a cold beer and uncapped it.
“You won’t join me?” he asked, pulling out a chair at the long, oak table. Watching Isabella bustle around the kitchen, he looked at her long, bare legs again, still surprised at the changes in her. Izzie.
“No, as I said, I ate earlier,” she said. “But I’ll have a glass of iced tea with you.”
She opened a cabinet and stood on tiptoe to try to reach a glass pitcher on a high shelf. When she did, her T-shirt pulled tightly across her full breasts and Colin inhaled, his temperature rising another notch. He stood and crossed the room, reaching up to get the pitcher and hand it to her, his fingers brushing hers when he did so.
Again something flickered in the depths of her eyes. He knew she felt that sparkling electricity, too.
He clenched his teeth and turned away. He didn’t want to feel sparks if she were a total stranger much less someone he had known for years. Years and another lifetime ago.
He sat and ran his fingers along the cold beer bottle, then raised it to hold against his hot temple. He tried to keep his gaze anywhere except on her.
Giving him a speculative look, she said, “I don’t suppose you’re checked into the Stallion Pass Grand.”
He shook his head. “I’ll get out of here. Stop worrying.”
“Where will you go?”
He thought about what he would do next. “I wanted to see your brother and Jonah while I’m here, but I want to see Mike first. I don’t have to, I just wanted to. We go back a long way.”
“You can stay here,” she said.
“After what I put you through, I figured you’d want me gone.”
“I know Mike and Jonah. You four guys were really close. They’d want you to stay,” she said, getting ice and pouring tea for herself. Having washed a potato and put it in the microwave oven for him, she put a thick piece of prime meat in the oven. “I don’t mind you being here.”
“Thanks. I’ll take you up on that offer. It’ll be paradise after where I’ve been.”
In minutes she had the prime rib, a steaming potato with butter and grated cheese ready for him, along with generous slices of French bread. She sat across from him.
; “You said you were concerned about being followed. How likely is it that you were?”
“Not likely,” he answered. Then dug into his dinner with relish.
“I’ve got someone after me who wants me dead,” Colin explained, picking his words carefully. “If he had been following me that closely, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. He wouldn’t have waited until I got here. I’ve been damn careful—which you may not believe since you almost pulverized me.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I said before, I know that you could have stopped me. You just didn’t want to hit a woman. It sounds like you’re involved in some serious stuff, right up to your chin. Are you bringing trouble to my brother and Mike and Jonah?” she asked bluntly.
“That’s the last thing I want to do, which is why I went to so much trouble to keep my tracks covered and to slip into this house and contact Mike at night when no one else would see me. I don’t want to increase the danger to any of them.”
“’Increase the danger,’ she repeated with arched eyebrows. “So why did you come then? Why do you want to see them?” she asked with curiosity.
He knew she was worried about her brother. “I need to warn Mike, Jonah and Boone. I know I’m in danger. I think the three of them might be in danger, too.”
Chapter 2
“W hy would they be in danger?” Isabella demanded, chilled enough to rub her arms. Colin’s smoke-colored eyes were as cold as marble. None of her brother’s and his Special Forces friends were prone to exaggeration and she might not have seen Colin in years, but she doubted the man would be here without a good reason.
“All of them have been out of the military, away from that life, for a long time now,” she commented while Colin ate his dinner. “They have their lives and have been in the spotlight with this inheritance. Their lives are open and if anyone wanted to find them, it would be an easy thing.”
“It’s something that goes back to the explosion when everyone thought I’d been killed.” Putting down his fork, he gazed beyond her, a distant look coming to his eyes as if he had forgotten her existence or even where he was. “I died then in many ways,” he said so quietly that she had to lean closer to hear him; she was certain he had forgotten her presence.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to live.” With each word his voice grew more harsh, increasing the coldness surrounding her. “I still don’t care if I live or not, but I’m concerned about my friends. I don’t want anything to happen to them.”
As he talked, she studied his rugged yet appealing features. She had seen all the scars on his chest and back, but he was lean and muscular and looked incredibly fit. She was responding to him physically in a way she shouldn’t be. For all she knew, the man was married. Yet he certainly was sexy, dressed in black from head to toe. Dangerous and tough. There was no denying what those smoke-colored eyes could do to her pulse….
“That last mission I was on was covert. The four of us were to rescue an agent who had been taken hostage by a criminal terrorist.”
She remained silent. Boone never talked about his missions, especially that one, and she had only a sketchy knowledge of what had happened five years ago.
“I was the first to get to the building where they held the hostage. The other guys were behind me. As I went in, someone detonated a bomb. The hostage and I were closest to it.”
“That’s dreadful!” she exclaimed, half not wanting to hear what had happened and half of her needing to know.
“Someone had tipped the guys off. If the bomb had blown seconds later, all of us would have been killed.”
“But why didn’t anyone know you were alive?”
“When the car bomb exploded, I was directly in its path. The others knew they had to run for it. Mike, Jonah and Boone probably would have looked for me, but they saw me take the blast. They had to run for it. From what I pieced together later, the news reports had listed five men killed in the explosion, one unidentified. So, they would have assumed I was dead.
“From what I learned later, when the local authorities found us,” Colin continued, “they thought I was dead, but then someone detected a heartbeat so they rushed me to a hospital.”
His attention returned to Isabella and he focused on her as if realizing her presence again. “I was told all that much later. I had amnesia and to this day do not remember one thing from the moment of explosion until long afterward. Long, long afterward.”
“Colin, I’m sorry,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand. Instantly his fingers closed over hers and he held her hand firmly, his gray eyes focusing intently on her. Electricity streaked from his touch over every cell in her body.
“You make me feel like I’m home even more than when I saw my family and really was at home.”
“I don’t know how that can be,” she answered, her pulse quickening. She had reached out in sympathetic gesture, but the instant his hand had closed over hers and he’d looked at her, the contact transformed into a fiery, physical awareness. She didn’t react this way to other men and she didn’t want such a response with a man who was danger personified. Besides, as she dimly recalled, Colin had a fiancée in his past.
He was not wearing a wedding ring, but she would not be surprised to hear that he was married by now.
“Why didn’t you let your family know you were alive?”
He dropped her hand. “It’s a long story,” he said in a tone so filled with bitterness she was sorry she had asked.
“So you got over the amnesia,” she prompted, wanting to hear the rest of his story and why her brother and his friends might be in danger.
“Somewhat,” he said, taking another bite of potato. “I remember most everything except the explosion and a couple of weeks afterward.”
“That was a long time ago. Why does it matter now?”
“The ringleader of the terrorists escaped the blast, but I’m sure he doesn’t want me to live—I’m the witness who can identify him if I can just remember what went down. My memory is gone. No one knows when it might fully return. If it does, I may also know enough to identify a double agent who was involved. Someone tipped the terrorists about our plan to rescue the hostage, who was a U.S. agent. There’s a good chance the spy was one of our own men and he wants me dead.”
“How do you know a double agent was involved?”
“Someone had that meeting set up to kill us and the hostage. If we had all gone in together as we’d originally planned, they would’ve succeeded. Someone arranged things a little too well—it had to be an inside job.”
She shivered. “That’s dreadful. Someone you worked with set all of you up?”
“Right. The CIA suspect they have a double agent high up in the ranks. Secrets are getting out that have hurt them. Men like us have been killed because their cover has been blown.”
“That’s dreadful, but if my brother and Mike and Jonah weren’t there with you and the hostage, why are they in danger?”
“For that, we need to go back to when I was injured. After the explosion, I was in a foreign hospital for over a year. It was a while before I knew who I was.”
“You were an American. Didn’t they try to contact someone about you?” she asked.
He stopped to take a long drink of beer, wiping his mouth and eating a bite of roast. After a moment he continued. “When I began to remember enough to know who I was, I contacted—” He stopped abruptly and looked away. A muscle worked in his jaw and she realized he still was emotionally entangled in the memories of his past.
She was uneasy, a chilling fear growing that even though he didn’t want to bring trouble to them, he had. But maybe, as he was trying to tell her, the trouble was already here and his news would help alert Boone, Jonah and Mike.
Colin was silent so long, she wondered if he had forgotten what he was saying. “You said you contacted—whom?” she prompted him. “The army?”
“No. Danielle, my fiancée. She was my first thought when I regained my memory
. I thought if I could just reconnect with her, I’d be okay. But she had gotten married. The hostage exchange was to take place in one of those obscure Eastern European countries near Russia. I was brought into the hospital with no identification and no memory. Since I could speak fluent Russian and no authorities or military were looking for me, I was pretty unimportant. Those people had their own civil war going on and there was so much unrest and turmoil going on that I was hardly worth any interest at the time,” Colin said quietly between clenched teeth. He had stopped eating and was staring into space again. “After that I didn’t care then whether I lived or not. Nothing made sense. To most of the world, my family, my friends, the army, I was dead. So, as far as I was concerned, I was dead.”
“That’s terrible! Colin, your family was so hurt. They were at Mike’s wedding and they were still grieving.”
“I know and I regret their hurt. I was in and out of surgery, had to go to therapy, had setbacks. Then, because of the political situation, I was put into prison. I didn’t care and wanted to die.”
“Things went from bad to worse for you!” she exclaimed, knowing how tough all four men were and amazed that Colin had succumbed to grief. Then she realized how vulnerable he would have been with a memory loss and injuries and on medications and totally cut off from family and friends. “I’m sorry.”
“No need for you to be sorry. You had nothing to do with any of what happened. I finally managed to contact the military. They got me out of there and to a hospital on a U.S. base in Germany.”
“Why didn’t you contact your family at that time?”
“I hurt and didn’t care to live, and for a time, didn’t know whether or not I would survive. If I didn’t get well, I didn’t want my family to go through losing me twice. Maybe it was wrong, but my thinking was fuzzy. Half the time I was medicated too much to think clearly.”
“So what happened?”
“Once the military got into it, things changed. I got good medical care and had a lot of reconstructive surgery. Actually, they did a fair job on my face. They had to rebuild my cheekbones and my jaw and my nose.”